A Divided City “Ethnic” and “Religious” Conflicts In
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A DIVIDED CITY “ETHNIC” AND “RELIGIOUS” CONFLICTS IN KARACHI, PAKISTAN1 Laurent GAYER2 « Meri tamir mein muzmir key ik surat kharabi ki, hayola barkey khirman ka hey khoonay garm dekhan ka… » [Inherent in my creation is the seed of my own destruction, the passion of my creative endeavour creates instead the force which strikes me down] Ghalib3. When Sir Charles David Napier reached the port of Karachi in 1843, all he found was a small fishermen’s village protected by mud ramparts, which was linked to the outside world by two doors : the door of “salted water” (kharadar), giving access to the Arabian Sea, and the door of “sweet water” (mithadar), facing the Lyari river. The town, which was founded in 1729, was known as Kalachi-jo ghote (Kalachi’s pond), in memory of a local fisherman4. It had only 14 000 inhabitants and its commercial potential was limited, as its port was unfit for high tonnage foreign ships. Yet, the dusty hamlet, whose climate Napier found more salubrious than Hyderbad’s, soon received the favours of the Raj. Even if it had no modern infrastructures, Karachi’s port was an important knot in the regional “proto-globalized” economy5 since the eighteenth century, linking 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the first Pakistan Seminar organised by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), Amsterdam, March 24, 2003. 2 Ph.D candidate and lecturer in international relations theory at Sciences Po, Paris. 3 Quoted by Maniza Naqvi, Mass Transit, Karachi : Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 13. 4 The first known historical reference to Karachi is due to an emissary of Nader Shâh, Muzafar Ali Khan, who mentions his stay in the city in his Tuhfat-ul Kirram, written in 1742. Karachi was founded 13 years earlier by a certain Bhojumal, who got its ramparts built by Arabian workers paid in dates imported from Bahreïn and Muscat ; cf. Sohrab K.H. Katrak, Karachi. That was the Capital of Sindh, Lahore, 1963. 5 The notion of « proto-globalization » was coined by world historians “to refer two interacting political and economic developments that became especially prominent between about 1600 and 1800 in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa : the reconfiguration of state systems, and the growth of finance, services and pre-industrial manufacturing” ; cf. A.G. Hopkins, “Introduction : globalization – an agenda for historians”, in A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History, Londres : Pimlico, 2002, p. 5. Laurent Gayer – A divided city. “Ethnic” and “religious” conflicts in Karachi, Pakistan – Mai 2003 1 http://www.ceri-sciences-po.org Sindh and Punjab with the Persian Gulf and, further, with China and Africa6. At the end of the 1830s, ships sailing from Europe, China and India, transiting through Bombay, were bringing iron, silk, satin, velvet, cotton, ghee, coconuts and spices, while vessels from Muscat brought precious “proto-global” commodities such as dates, ivory and slaves7. The goods leaving Karachi by sea were various too : salt, skins and dry fish were exported to Kutch and Muscat, while shark fins and opium8 were destined to China. The colonisation of Karachi connected it even tighter to the world economy. The British started modernising Karachi’s port from 1854 onwards. The bay was dredged, in order to make it fit for high tonnage ships and modern docks were built9. Napier’s successor to the post of “commissioner-in-Sinde”, Sir Bartle Frere, who took his functions in 1851, also saw a bright future for Karachi, which he considered as “an alternative of Calcutta for the internal security of the Empire”10. In the 1860s, Karachi’s economy benefited from the American cotton crisis and in the 1870s McLeod Road became the hub of Karachi’s commercial and financial activities, being home to an ever increasing number of European firms and banks. In 1885-1886, eight more European firms opened a branch in Karachi and the connection of Sindh with the Punjab through railway links made the transportation of wheat and cotton to its port far easier, so that in 1899 “it outstrip[ped] Bombay as wheat exporter-340,000 tons to 310,000 tons”11. In 1889, the construction of Empress Market doted Karachi with the second largest vegetable market in the work world after Bombay and at the end of the nineteenth century, Karachi had become a serious rival for more ancient cities such as Bombay and Calcutta. The first world war turned it into “the grocery of India”12 and it played a key role in the logistic support to British and allied troops. During the second world war, Karachi was yet again a major knot in the procurement of food and equipment to the allies’ troops and it became a major “ship hospital”, where a thousand vessels undertook reparation between 1942 and 194513. On the eve of Partition, Karachi had 425,000 inhabitants and 2,8 million tons of cargo were transiting annually through its port, wheat and cotton counting for 70 % of these exports. By 1958, those exports had risen to 4 million tons and Karachi’s future looked brighter than ever, both 6 For a remarkable history of the Sindhi trade diaspora, which played a decisive role in the rise of Karachi, cf. Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947. Traders of Sindh from Bukhara to Panama, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000. 7 The slaves sold in Karachi came mostly from East Africa. They were known locally as Sidis (this term designating Africans in general) or Habshis (this term being applied to Abyssinians only). The 3/4th of the 650 Sidis “imported” annually were young girls, who cost between sixty and a hundred rupees. The number of Habshis was more limited, 30 to 40 of them being “imported” annually. The British made this trade illegal in 1839 but it seems to have perpetuated itself for a few more years. 8 Sindhi opium was mostly prepared in the Larkana and Sikharpur area and it generally transited through Diu and Daman, before sailing for China in Portuguese vessels. Opium was brought to Karachi by camel caravans and yearly shipments varied from 80 to 1500 camel loads in the first decades of the nineteenth century ; cf. Secretariat Karachi Port Trust, History of Karachi Port, Karachi, 1980, p. 15. 9 Although the construction of Karachi’s port docks started in 1882, it was only completed in 1944. 10 Quoted by Yasmeen Lari and Mihail S. Lari, The Dual City. Karachi During the Raj, Karachi : Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 91. 11 Ibid, p. 130. 12 Sohrab K.H. Katrak, Karachi. That was the Capital of Sindh, Lahore, 1963, p. 27. 13 Z.A. Nizami, Karachi Through the Centuries, Karachi Development Authority, 198 ?. Laurent Gayer – A divided city. “Ethnic” and “religious” conflicts in Karachi, Pakistan – Mai 2003 2 http://www.ceri-sciences-po.org economically and politically. The massive influx of refugees from India, who came to be known as “Mohajirs”, between 1947 and 1951, brought Karachi under intense demographic pressure but it also provided it with a highly competent workforce and an experienced bureaucracy, which made the economic and the political success of the capital of Pakistan in the following years. Karachi’s localisation had played in its favour when the time to choose a capital had come for the Muslim Leaguers. Lahore, the great rival of Karachi in West Pakistan, was considered too close to the border with India and, thus, strategically vulnerable, while Rawalpindi was a middle-range town which could not pretend to compete with its more illustrious rivals. Dacca’s case, for its part, “had been doomed from the very start” due to the minor role played by Bengal in the Pakistan movement14. And whereas the Punjab and Bengal had collapsed amidst anarchy in the last months of the British Raj, Karachi had remained “a relative haven of tranquillity”15. The city, whose municipality was the oldest of India16 and which had become the capital of Sindh in 1937 after the province was separated from Bombay, “could also boast of a nucleus of administrative buildings, which was what a central government suddenly faced with the problem of housing the offices of an entire state needed”17. Karachi was officially made the capital of Pakistan on 22nd May 1948, when the Constituent Assembly decided that it would be separated from Sindh to become a federally-administered area. This decision fuelled the anger of Sindhi ansars towards the mohajirs, whom they deemed as arrogant city-dwellers full with contempt for the “sons of the soil”. The seeds of ethnic strife were thus planted in Sindh, which would soon become a battleground for aggrieved “ethnic groups” constructing their identities through their confrontation with the other(s). Karachi’s modern history is thus marked by an apparent economic success mitigated by violent “ethnic” and, more recently, “sectarian” conflicts. However, such categorisation is deeply problematic, though. Karachi’s alleged “ethnic” and “sectarian” conflicts initially had little to do with ethnicity and religiosity : they were fundamentally urban struggles opposing local factions for the control of the most prosperous city in the country. In the 1980s, Karachi’s urban crisis fuelled social antagonisms which turned into ethnic rivalries due to the particular social division of work in the city. The Afghan jihad also brought to Karachi a flow of arms and drugs which gave birth to a culture of ultra-violence amongst the city youth, for whom Russian TT-pistols became the hottest commodity in town. Since the Afghan jihad has “come home”, in the 1990s and even more so after the fall of the Tâleban18, Karachi’s ethnic conflicts seem to have been supplanted by “sectarian” ones but this shift is open to question, as Karachi remains a largely secular city, where 14 Tai Yong Tan & Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, London/New York : Routledge, 2000, p.